Dr. Mark Gordon on covid-19: what the evidence says · JRE #1589
SUBJECT: COVID-19
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
It's like 85% of the people who have low, less than 30, have it. And as you move up the scale to the higher level, greater than 60, you see 90% of the people have nothing.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Gordon appears to be referencing the type of retrospective analysis published by Kaufman et al. (2020) in PLOS ONE, which examined over 190,000 US patients and found SARS-CoV-2 test positivity was inversely associated with circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. However, the actual figures in that study are far smaller than Gordon's stated 85%-vs-90% split: positivity was 12.5% among patients with deficient levels (below 20 ng/mL), 8.1% among those with adequate levels (30-34 ng/mL), and 5.9% among those with levels of 55 ng/mL or higher. No published study shows 85% of people with vitamin D below 30 ng/mL testing positive for or contracting COVID-19, nor 90% of people above 60 ng/mL being asymptomatic or unaffected. The vitamin D-COVID literature broadly shows a modest, observational, dose-dependent inverse association between vitamin D status and infection risk, not a threshold effect of the magnitude described. Because these are observational data, the association could partly reflect confounding (age, obesity, comorbidities, indoor lifestyle) rather than a direct causal effect of vitamin D itself, and no large randomized controlled trial has confirmed that vitamin D supplementation prevents COVID-19 infection at the rate implied. The specific 85%/90% figures as stated do not match any known published dataset and substantially overstate the strength of the real association.